The difference between barely running on Oculus/Vive and screaming 4K is about £2,500.

You may consider yourself an enterprising PC game-machine builder, and in the past few years, you may have built a pretty damned good rig. That doesn't mean you went crazy, however. Graphics standards have levelled off a bit lately—at least, enough for a reasonably priced machine to run "max" settings at the standard screen resolution of 1080p or even rock-solid frame rates and high fidelity at 1440p.

Those specs are still within quite reasonable reach, but system builders may now want to target two additional, beefier visual standards: 4K monitors and virtual reality headsets.

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The former can mean a few different resolutions, but this goal typically quadruples the pixel count of standard 1080p resolution. And while the retail Oculus and Vive headsets have fewer pixels than 4K displays, they have to refresh content at 90 frames-per-second to offset nausea concerns—which far outpace the demands of a standard 1080p/60 display. Either way, if you haven't built a new PC in a while, you're gonna need a bigger boat.

Exactly how much bigger, though? In VR's case, that's a tough question to answer definitively, because the VR ecosystem is still in flux. The specs attached to VR's first wave of headsets (resolution, refresh rate, and so on) are locked, at least. But games are still being finished, major game-rendering engines are still being optimised, and computer device drivers will surely see updates.

With VR's first wave of headsets on the horizon, we at Ars believe it's a good time to revisit our PC system guide with virtual reality and its high resolution and refresh demands at the forefront. At this early point in the VR life cycle, we have gathered data and test results to recommend three builds: a base-level VR system at the cheapest price possible, a VR-focused system that will get you the best performance right now, and then some tweaks for a maxed-performance machine for anyone that wants to do both VR and 4K gaming. While we may need to (and intend to) revisit these a bit more often than your run-of-the-mill system guide, the slew of impending launch dates means the start time is now.

But first—to wait for Pascal, or not?

On the GPU side, we're going with all-Nvidia this time around. The Geforce 970 and 980 Ti cards we recommend below are solid fits for VR, but the next generation of GPUs is lurking just over the horizon: Nvidia's Pascal architecture. It's possible we'll get a formal reveal of actual products with Pascal-based chips at the GPU Technology Conference next month, with Pascal video cards hitting the market by early summer.

Enlarge/ Nvidia's Maxwell chips—soon to be eclipsed by Pascal, apparently.

Nvidia

Pascal looks to be a huge leap over the Maxwell architecture powering Nvidia's current lineup. If you're looking to upgrade your gaming rig for VR and you don't feel the burning desire to be the first kid on your block to be playing in VR, it's almost certainly a good idea to wait until mid-year when Pascal cards are available—if, that is, the current release date rumors are true. That's the rub. We only know what we know, and right now there's no official release date for Pascal cards other than "2016."

With Oculus Rifts and HTC Vives beginning to ship in about three weeks, we're pressing ahead with this guide using currently available technology. If you need to buy now, here's what to get.

This build might require a £20 USB 3.0 controller for Oculus compatibility, which would bring the cost to £755.

Retailers have been eager to advertise pre-built, "VR-ready" computers, which include baseline configurations that hover around £900. But how much money can we save if we build our own? About a hundred pounds, based on what we know about games being built so far for both the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift. Savings can be considerably more than that if you're reusing an existing monitor or keyboard.

A lot of first-wave VR game makers are focusing development on the Unity engine, including 11 of the 12 teams who presented at the January SteamVR developer showcase. Unity makes the game-building process pretty efficient, and game makers can very quickly get their games' frame rates up to acceptable levels in Unity—which is priority number one for a smooth user experience. However, Unity is not an engine known for incredible multi-core optimisations.

Enlarge/ The Vive Pre. Making this run right takes a system with some grunt.

Kyle Orland

Meaning, you can pony up for a quad-core or eight-core or whatever-core processor if you want, but it won't get you a ton of performance difference in the near term. As long as you grab a processor that safely maxes at around 3.3 GHz—the minimum recommendation from both the Oculus and HTC Vive teams—you'll have more than enough CPU power. Your number one VR-system priority is going to be your video card.

Both Oculus and HTC want you to buy nothing short of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 or an AMD R9 290 for guaranteed, silky-smooth VR performance. Each of those cards sports 4GB of DDR5 VRAM and clocks in at around 1000 MHz. We pored over user reports from the recent SteamVR testing tool in the hopes that we'd find a dark-horse choice for a cheaper GPU—particularly this ever-expanding list of results from reddit's HTC Vive community—but the closest we got was some decent test results for the GTX 780 Ti. That card is harder to find and generally costs more than the other recommended minimums, anyway. AMD R9 290 cards are a good option but seem scarce right now, so we're going with an ever-so-slightly pricier GTX 970 by PNY. Price on that is currently down £280.

To keep costs down, we're going with an AMD CPU on the budget build. You won't bust through into the top ranks of any benchmarks, but it'll get you where you need to be for VR.

In terms of processors, both HTC and Oculus recommend the Intel i5-4590 as a bare minimum, which is clocked at 3.3 GHz and costs around £170. Though we'd generally rather stick with Intel processors for gaming purposes, this is the cheap VR system we're talking about. With the GPU as the bigger emphasis, we're gonna opt to slice the price down by second-guessing the system recommendations a bit. SteamVR test results point to a low-cost AMD processor doing quite well: the FX-4350, which rocks four cores at 4.2 GHz and currently costs only £75. While Oculus has encouraged early adopter VR fans to stick to Intel processors due to higher per-thread performance across the board, AMD's own announcement about the FX-8350 being Oculus compatible, combined with similar numbers for the 4350 and a lack of multi-core optimisations for the first wave of VR games in general, make us comfortable saving money with this choice. We're not picking an A8 or anything like that, at least.

Enlarge/ You might need to spring for a PCI-E USB 3.0 card for Oculus Rift compatibility. The Rift is picky about its USB 3.0 connection—some controllers reportedly add too much latency to the data path.

With those decisions made, it's time to pick a socket AM3+ motherboard. We're giving the nod to a Gigabyte Micro-ATX mobo, the GA-78LMT, though we might also need a USB 3.0 add-on card to comply with Oculus' picky, latency-sensitive requirements. This Oculus-recommended £20 PCI-E card might be a worthwhile add-on. (HTC has made no such USB 3.0 recommendations, so if you're Vive-only, you can probably safely skip this expense.)

Oculus recommends 8GB of system RAM to run smooth VR content, while HTC says you can scrape by with only 4GB. As much as we want to keep this build's cost down, the difference between 4GB and 8GB is too puny to be worth missing one of the two headset's recommendations. Pick up 2x4GB of whatever brand you prefer; Corsair is fine, for about £34.

We definitely want an SSD drive, but here's another opportunity to reduce the cost. In our preliminary testing, we've found that many VR games' install sizes really aren't all that huge, often in the 300MB to 700MB range. This is presumably because devs are currently opting for smaller textures and other data reductions since these games are meant to blaze at 90 fps. Slap a 120GB SSD hard drive into this system and you'll be fine. In searching for the right mix of decent read/write speeds, low costs, and minimal angry reviews, we opted for a £40 offering from Zotac. [This drive can be hard to find in the UK; the Corsair Force 120GB is a fine choice, too.]

We can save money on the power supply by choosing a loud, cheap option, and we want at least 400W to have wattage headroom, so we've included an own-brand a 500W option with mediocre reviews for just £12.

Nothing in our build requires overclocking or special airflow considerations, so we're recommending this serviceable £20 case, which will leave plenty of room for your new video card. It's not a flashy case, though. Blue LED lighting is up to you.

There's currently no way to boot directly to either the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive headsets, so you'll need a monitor. We're going with this cheap but serviceable 24" Acer G246HLF for £115 , which is a perfectly cromulent 1080p desktop monitor. There are other cheaper refurbished options out there, though, that you're of course at liberty to buy instead.

If you don't have a keyboard and mouse handy, we recommend topping the system off with a wireless keyboard that has an embedded touchpad, such as Logitech's £32 K400. That makes it easier to fiddle with Windows menus from anywhere in a room—especially with the room-scale Vive system. Both headsets save you a few quid by coming complete with their respective default controllers and headset options—built-in headphones on the Rift and complimentary earbuds with the Vive. Wireless options might not appeal to everyone, though, so feel free to drop in your own input devices as needed.

Without a monitor, keyboard, or mouse, this build's parts and OS will set you back about £600. That sure beats the ~£900 minimum from the cheapest "VR-ready" computer we've seen advertised as of late—and remember, those aren't priced with monitors or keyboards or mice, either. This build doubly serves as a fine 1080p and even 1440p machine for most modern 2D games at medium-to-high settings.